In ONE A.M. Charlie played a drunk in evening clothes. Childhood memories of his actor father (above right) were the basis for that portrayal.

THE QUEEN’S HEAD
CHARLIE CHAPLIN SR.'S FAVORITE WATERING HOLE

As a small boy, Charlie frequently hung around this pub hoping to catch a glimpse of his alcoholic actor father who he sorely missed and desperately yearned to get to know.

Jeffrey Vance Collection
Scene from One A.M.

Instead of sporting his signature film costume, Chaplin did a brilliant solo turn dressed in the formal tuxedo which was his father’s signature stage costume. During an emotionally painful two month period that father and son actually lived together, Charlie Chaplin Sr. would routinely weave his woozy way home after a hard night’s “work” which--in his peculiar profession—regularly required a hard night’s drinking.

Alcoholism was an occupational hazard of his profession. Despite the glamour and fame of his dangerous night job which came with lucrative “hazard pay” (which was earmarked to be spent socializing with fans and admirers at the theatre bar), a lion comique’s life was a death sentence. Nearly every one of the members of that doomed fraternity of hard-drinking, elegant swells died young of severe alcoholism (the 19th century version of our 20th century drug addiction and drug overdose casualties in modern rock star cults).

Touring in music hall as a featured performer in a Karno troupe,
Charlie earned his ticket to Hollywood by playing a comic drunk in A Night in an English Music Hall where
Mack Sennett first discovered him.

Charlie as a member of a “father-son” duo of
comic drunks in his masterpiece City Lights.

“Tragedy is a close-up, comedy is a long shot,” Chaplin once remarked. The rogues gallery portraits of alcoholics he created during the course of his career as a filmmaker illustrates his concept of the spectrum between comedy and tragedy. In One A.M. (1916), he did a broad “far-shot” caricature of a lion comique. In City Lights (1930)—a bittersweet comedy--Chaplin gave us a more tightly focused, “medium-shot” study of his ambivalent relationship with a moody and boozy “millionaire” father figure. In Limelight, he finally gave us a tragic “close-up,” portrait of an aging actor as a washed-up alcoholic comedian who has fallen on hard times. (As an impressionable young child, Charlie probably thought of his own father as a wealthy “millionaire” because he had once been capable of earning as much as 40 pounds per week for a one-week theatrical engagement in his all-too-brief heyday: roughly the 2006 CPI equivalent of $4,500 per week).

Attempting to figure out what went wrong in his parents’ marriage in his unpublished novel Footlights (which he later used as the screenplay treatment for Limelight), Chaplin wrote of his mother’s “tragic promiscuity” and his father’s “febrile hilarity.” He was haunted by the question of who was to blame. Did his father drink too much because his wife was unfaithful to him? Or was his mother unfaithful because his father drank too much?

Chaplin had already approached this unresolvable question about his parents’ marriage much more humorously in an earlier film The Idle Class (see next essay).